DRAG, the Series: Costume

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...


We began sewing at least 50,000 years ago. Clothing and textile ever since have been used not only for practical purposes, but symbolic ... and, if you think you are not dressed symbolically, even if you're reading this in your jammies, think again. LOOK again.

Most of us choose our symbols out of prefabricated options, sometimes with more consideration than others. But think about a drag queen; as often as not, she has created her own "look" - not merely in terms of painted features, but also in costume. A queen is a seamstress, a model, a performer - wearing a thousand themes through a thousand nights, and generally conceiving and creating every aspect of a look and a performance all on their own. A queen is inspired to a theme, but also has to look to practicals - is the piece I'm making utilitarian for me to sing, or lip synch, or dance, or all of the above? What are the optical principles in presentation - in a dark hall or bar, in front of this crowd or that, in front of dozens - or hundreds - or thousands?

Dressing outlandishly is an art. Indeed, *many* arts. From design to performance, from choosing materials to deploying them, drag is head-to-toe ... inflatables, headpieces, shoes, unexpected materials. There is engineering to consider - will this prosthetic makeup hold up to the movement of my face, will the paper gown survive sitting down, or a long meet-and-greet with fans?


Makeup AND costume



fashion history and what's old is new again ... The study of the history of costume is the study of history itself, and perhaps a more insightful one than strictly reading direct sources. Looking at modes and methods of dress can tell the story of social priorities - even scandals - and deepens our understanding of the times in which surviving textiles or portraits were made. Oh MY!


what is appropriate to wear where. Clothing as instruction: this is for girls, this is for boys ... the eye it takes not just to see these distortions, but then to parlay them into art, beauty, and commentary.

Our culture is about choosing an identity and sticking with it so people can market shit to you
--RuPaul Charles

You hear often that drag is an "armor." The thing is, this is true for everyone, every day. The importance of costume exists for EVERYBODY, even those who think they're not doing it, not paying attention. If you dress yourself at all - and if you don't (there is no escape, Major Major) - we present ourselves to the world, even when we're not dressing up for other people. Even when all we present is what we prepared just to manage the physical act of living.

If humanity as a whole is constantly evoking, demolishing, reimagining, and retrieving our fashions, even as we feel the need to just-as-constantly make fun of what is old. Sometimes, those among us creating the real rules by which we actually live are those of us destroying what, ideally, we might like to be the rules. Drag is destruction, and simultaneously it is creation. That's a hellaciously difficult magic trick, and it is one of the keys of beauty itself.

Self-decoration is older than homo sapiens itself; in the ochre of ancient hominid burials, we see the urge to beauty - to self-presentation - in the deepest history of what we are. It is tied to religion and death, and without it there is no culture, no society at all.
............ "The only thing I didn't like was the makeup" ... "You don't need makeup"


"Fake it till you make it" ...

Grand Guignol
We use exposure to our fears to get over our fears, but also for the *thrill* of the fear.


Not long ago, I was watching an episode of "Lucifer" in which an immortal character is costumed in a completely innocuous sweater with a peter-pan collar. She's in no way presented with fantasy color or extreme style, but her sweater is embroidered with dozens of bees. It wasn't a design choice 99% of viewers would even register, but for the very few who would, it was meaningful - and quietly gratifying.

All our clothing is projection. Drag is projection. Projection of wishes, projection of feelings, projection of fears - thrilling, and inuring. And beautiful

DRAG, the Series: Challenge

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...


The thing about most offputting entertainments and art forms throughout history is this: they *mean* to be offputting. To a certain audience. Ugliness, cacophany, discomfort in art are a direct challenge, always, to prevailing assumptions. And right now, for a western-centric culture out to homogenize the world, a culture which has dressed men the same for upward of 200 years, there can be little wonder that one of the most popular challenges is the industrial-scale insurgency of drag

I’m not doing drag to give you makeup tips. This has always been a political statement.
RuPaul Charles

Nancy Pelosi ... YOUTUBE CLIP OF HER FROM RDR



There is no one way to be gay ... or drag, or masculine, or feminine, or a particular age, or republican, or spiritual. More specifically: there is no wrong way to be any of these things, or any others.

I do Goth wrong. In my life, the very essence of nonconformity has been ... showing up at a tattoo convention and having a triple piercing removed. "You went to a tattoo festival and got yourself UN-maimed," my brother said, and it was a revelation to me. Or wearing sky blue and glitter lipgloss to a Type O Negative show, or putting together a 40s-vintage ensemble, but wearing forest green lipstick amongst otherwise "authentic" hair and clothing and period-perfect makeup.

We. All. Contain. Multitudes.



People have been weird since we've been people: truly, independently, fiercely weird. We have also been "people" for more than three hundred thousand years - not merely hairy little tool-users who put the dead away systematically or even ritually - but engaging in trade, and even processing pigment from stone.

Using pigment to permanently mark ourselves.

Pigment is at the heart not only of art, but of self-decoration. And even self-decoration performs double-duty - many people are aware that eyeliner dates back thousands of years, but fewer realize its practical application, in reducing visual glare in a very sunny region. The principal of dark patches on the face to improve bright-light vision survives today, quite prominently.



Our attachment to our tools and our expressions is the basis for the very concept of sin.



Fishy aesthetic versus Acid Betty, Dirt Woman, Divine (both glamorous and un-"pretty", using symbols of the former and co-opting the latter to invent something new)...

Perhaps especially during the 1970s and 1980s, punk and drag had a lot in common, and RuPaul's early days show a grungy, harder-edged New Wave image.



This post "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" and I'll publish it anyway ... this post is a challenge. Ooh, how meta.

DRAG, the Series: Beauty

I have decided to leave this series of posts, intentionally, in a very draft form. This owes to the upheaval of the past month of my personal life, yes ... but it also feels fitting, as the entire point of this discussion of drag is about construction and challenging assumptions. To smooth it all into coherent, long prose might obscure the various parts, and thoughts, I have put into this, and they perhaps should stand out starkly. In honesty, much of what I say is just intros to the links embedded. And so, here is this series. Unfinished. Challenging - to me, in one sense, and to the audience in another. Seems right ...

The only thing I didn't like was the makeup.

On its opening weekend, I went to see A Wrinkle in Time with a group of people, most of them new to me, and one of the most interesting counterpoints to the diversity and inclusion celebrated by the film was the quote above. Stated by someone I suspect would consider their liberal cred to be beyond reproach, the idea was that The Mrs. Ws' fantastical appearances set a bad example for little girls by way of cosmetics.

This was said to me at a time I had my hair jacked up to Jesus, was wearing all metallics, and my eyeshadow was silver and not at all subtle. Also, I have blue hair for pete's sakes.

The lady opining did not join us after the movie, but I have been stuck with her restrictive liberal ideals in the same way I've been struck and confounded by prescriptivist liberality before. The way I really hate.

If feminism is about choice, what feminist is to say it is INVALID right on its face (and do pardon the pun, please) for a woman to wear makeup? Or a man? And if makeup is an evil tool of the conformity-enforcing Evil Beauty Industry, out to subjugate women into narrow beauty ideals ... where is it bedazzled eyebrows and green glitter eyeshadow fit in to this narrow, cis, white ideal?

As I have said before. Sometimes, makeup is not about remediation. It's special effects. And nobody - man, woman, or anyone else - gets to prescribe for me what is limiting, or to limit me by "setting me free" from it either.



silhouette - of period clothing, of presumed gender-conforming bodies, of nonconforming bodies

corsetry jewelry

cleavage, highlight/shadow ("The champagne glass") - controlling light itself, synthesizing it for illusion

erasing the face to repaint stereotypical femininity, or owning one's own features to challenge the binary (bald queens, eyebrows) ... Kevyn Aucoin's erasure art, queens who emphasize their own - amplification versus obliteration ... the BEAT face



Self-decoration predates anatomically modern humanity itself. We have been decorating ourselves since before "we" WERE "ourselves" - ochre and seashell jewelry, religion, trade, and art reach as far back as our current understanding takes us. Pre-human, prehistoric. Cro magnon and Neanderthal man created beauty as well as tools, and the tools of beauty and art date back over 160,000 years.



Advent of "I can draw what I want" marketing and autonomy over rigid fashion - STYLE over fashion ... still an industry, but emphasis affected by people's needs. How much can commercial interests still command people reshaping themselves? How much has the narrow beauty standard *really* changed? Really at the point where individuals are using the beauty industry, or still beholden to beauty standards?



As with most things, the alterations we perform to create beauty can pass into The Uncanny Valley, where synthesizing the suppleness of youth with plumpers and tightening becomes ghastly. Pop culture obsesses, at times, on hatred of this tendency - making fun of everyone from always-a-target Jocelyn Wildenstein to the Jenners/Kardashians for "overdoing it" ... and this both happens in drag, and is played-with in drag. Not a few queens proudly name their alterations, and it's difficult not to suspect that many who do it do so less for ideals of beauty than for the exaggeration of those ideals - for intentional effect. Special effects.

Drag USES the Uncanny Valley, gooses it - can transform it from challenge into a new definition of beauty.

Scale

God said let there be lights in the firmament of the Heaven, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years.

My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

To a fruitfly, it might seem a wasteland of time, beyond bearing.

To a molecule ... to an atom, to a gluon ... all existing at such different scales: would my life seem vanishingly short, or extraordinary in its immensity?

A living cell might exist within a comprehensible "human" scale, though it comes and goes more quickly than we do.

The molecule - these can be broken so easily, or may hold tight for eons and eons. Some unstable and brief, some all but immortal from where humanity stands.

Down into the tenacious atom ... the nucleus ... these buzzing, speeding systems outstripping any velocity we can understand - are we great, slow, neverending collossi, or fleeting organisms, so ephemeral as to be irrelevant? So tempting to conceive a universe in the orbit of an atom. So human.

And, if space folds into itself, who is to say that scale does not ... that Horton was right, along with every one of us when we discover the mind within the brain we already had: that, though we know the universe is the greatness around us, we also occupy the greatness which encloses lives and systems and universes impossibly small? That there are systems within us; planes we do not understand which make us up. Not merely the individual cells coming and going, each one's life one necessary part of what we think is "our" own life - but symbiants - even the impulses and autonomic actions that preserve life, but we do not create.

We are minuscule and immense; it is all in how we look - outward, and inward.

And we owe debt both to the greatness beyond us, as well as the greatness we enclose, which contains all we think is "small" ... That we are both gargantuan and infinitessimal, and that our part is to BE part of both these scales: in the universe, which is the organism of which all our lives are the tiniest part: and as the universe, within which myriad forces exist, dependent upon us, or making up the magic and meat that *is* us.



My lifespan seems a small enough thing to me.

But if I do not honor its scale, it might as well be nothing at all.

He died this morning at about seven. Thank you, Lord - for his life, and for his peace.

Meta-for

The old metaphor of life, like a candle, flaring up before it goes out ... really isn't strictly poetic. When you reduce them to lowest terms - that fire, and life, are energy processing systems - they are the same thing, fundamentally. A wick left on its own will burn until all its paraffin is gone or it sinks into its own matter, self-snuffing. Life seems similar; we eat, we burn - and, though human beings of course also do so much more than this processing, the end of fuel means the end of life.

What is rarely displayed is just how efficiently the human system burns, sometimes.

I put the blog on pause to wait out a system at its end ... and here, on day six, we still are waiting. Life is almost cruelly tenacious. And, like a candle, life can gutter by flaring up, by burning furiously and then flickering. And even then it may not be exhausted.

Life is *alarmingly* tenacious.



The sacred time we place, around birth or marriage or death, the most important things to us ... I have never spent so long, in my life, in this time removed from the world, from everyday life. I have been enclosed in sacred time so long now it may be time to emerge, at least for a day. Only, presumably, to go back inside. It is a dizzying prospect, even though the hermetic seal around us right now is itself rarefied and disconcerting/disorienting.

We are exhausted. The living, and the dying. But I have learned this: though I know I have had periods in sacred time before, thinking I wished it would go on and on ... now I understand in a more immediate way, the truly sacred part of time separated from the everyday, from the world: is that it must be finite. The truly sacred part is re-entering LIFE.

Tomorrow, I may have to do that. Let us see what tonight will bring.

We interrupt ...

The post series I was talking about is nicely developed, and will come. But first, a pause for my family.



When I was a kid, I understood that there *was* death. It seemed, like so much of my understanding, binary. There is life. There is death. We live in a dualistic culture - man and woman, light and dark, good and evil ... life, and death. Black and white. One is not the other.

As we get older, though, we learn: there is so much between Thing One and Thing Two.

It is an ever-growing horror, when we begin to learn *just* how much of a body can be dead, and yet its owner still lives on.


And so, I pause. For family.

I pray that, before you hear from me again, pause will have, for one person that I love, become just "stop." He deserves peace. And release. "Stop" cannot come too soon.

Collection

If you haven't already heard about the gorgeousness of Steve, you really ought to have a click. Steve happens to be a new auroral phenomenon ... or maybe he's something else entirely - but he's beautiful, his story is ridiculously charming, and you really have. to meet. Steve.

Oh my gosh, y'all. Judging a book by its spine ... is now kind of copyrighted. Events! Local bookstore small-business gloriousness! Discuss.

Here's a new one on me. I have friends who live in Israel, and have known many folks who grew up there, or lived there in the 80s, and one of my best friends goes pretty much every year with her family. I have even been myself, though that too was back in the 80s, and I was only fourteen. Through all this acquaintance with Israel, particularly Jerusalem, I've never heard of the Razzouk family: Coptic Christian tattoo artists who have been at work for seven centuries (first in Egypt, but since 1750 in Jerusalem). It makes sense that literally marking a pilgrimage to the Holy Land would be an enshrined act of faith, but having grown up in an American Christian community in which tattooing is all but The Devil's Work, this just had never occurred to me. From fertility to the blood and pain of a tattoo, they make a badge of faith and a reminder of it too. Interestingly, the family have also used the art in therapeutic tattoos, which we have seen on Otzi and seems to have been practiced for millennia across the world in many cultures. A fascinating article from tattoo anthropologist Lars Krutak.

Side note - at the longer link above and then here, I learned that George V and Edward VII both had tattoos. Huh.

Let's have a kiki

Image: Wikimedia Commons (labeled for re-use)
Miss Fame

It's on my mind to do a series of posts - specifically riffing on drag, though I will try to keep RuPaul's Drag Race references to a minimum - and focusing on the many layers of its making, as well as its cultural position and place(s). While I wonder a little whether this might alienate what audience I have, the point is more to look at the incredible breadth of Doing A Thing - and, in fact, one could write a similar series about just plain being an actor, or firefighter, musician, or visual artist. The discipline tends to be a part of the life of its practitioner, and I want to look at just how much we do in service of results which an awful lot of people might see as a single point in the wide tapestry of life.

Drag happens to touch on the recurrent thematics of this blog - social thought, yes, but also costuming, makeup, a focus on (at least certain particulars of) history, and the multifarious work of entertainment. It can be beautiful and challenging - at its best, and like so much art, it is both at once - and laughter and tears are all but mandatory.

Image: Wikimedia Commons (labeled for re-use)
This is Acid Betty

And too, like so much of what I write about, I am both an insider and very much NOT so. Subculturally, I've always been accepted even as I think of myself as an outsider, or even a poseur. So drag is one more thing I can appear to write about intelligently, but cannot with integrity claim to be any part of personally. Watching it, even caring deeply about it, being acquainted with those who *do* ... these are not qualifying criteria. So I have knowledge, but not cred.

So stay tuned. The organization is underway, and the thoughts, they are a-thinkin'. Your feedback in any form is always welcome, and I really hope to produce a thing or two of interest, even if the whole series may not be to all my readers' tastes.

Links:
Beauty
Challenge
Costume
Gender
Human

Collection

Every now and then, Blogger stats provide an interesting rabbit hole, or at least a blast from the past. Today, I happened upon this referral link. This makes me smile bittersweet smiles - firstly, because I have not seen The Lady Herself in far, far too long. But also because she talks of our writing group, and a particular story prompt which has never left my brain. The story is above 3500 words, but I've never found a finish - though its ghost has teased me more than once over the years.

This is why my main/long-form writing is historicals. It's never so hard to find an ending! (Just titles.)

Yes, Donna, I am thinking of the conversation we had, where you have no problems with titles and I take years to find them!

(T)he legitimation of cruelty, prejudice, falsehood, and corruption is the kind of thing, one would think, that religious people were born to oppose, not bless.

It's not a short read, but it's *splendid* writing. As all the best writing is, it's open, intelligent, and honest in viewing shortcomings from the inside ... as well as the margins. Because those who were once in are out, in many ways, and no single outlook can be said to typify perhaps any label anymore.


OH NO, NOT MORE TBR. Both the paean and the lament of any reader, the song of More Yummy Delicious BOOKS. I must-must-must have After the Death of Ellen Keldberg, not least because it sounds like an awfully good book, but also because the cover is a grabber, and at the link above you will find some thoughts on its design. By way of The Caustic Cover Critic. "Enjoy the crocuses." Excellent advice.


Am I the only person who enjoys the heck out of a good scholarly argument? I choose "argument" over "debate" because one of the joys of This Theory versus That Theory is witnessing how partisan participants can be (and indulging the luxury of not having any interest in either side, thus being open to many arguments). Here we have a great example of the genre, in anthropology. Archaeological/anthropological arguments often provide the best enjoyment, because these disciplines after all tell the story of humanity, and we certainly do like talking about ourselves. This sort of thing, for me at least, provides great exercise in critical thinking, which happens to be one of my favorite things. And this particular argument, centering on a volcanic winter, touches on phenomena which actually come into play in my own WIP, wherein the plagues and climatic changes post-535 AD loom large in the plot. I don't actually, necessarily, fully buy into the Catastrophe theory. But it sure makes a good story.

Collection

The book is precious – the scale of its contents makes it quaint, but those contents also store an  invaluable body of information. Instructions on Needle-Work and Knitting contains not only a curriculum, but also a hint at the sewn objects relevant to the lives of its students, and, in all likelihood, the products of their own hands...

Wow, is this a great post. Sewing is such a fundamental part of human history and culture. It's a shame that now so many of our clothing is really just extruded product like our food or cleaners or anything else - mostly chemical, and seldom considered. Fascinatingly, a recent marketing phenomenon, subscription clothing, makes an appearance in this text, providing an interesting consideration of class economics and the training side of education of the time. Excellent writing and scholarship (this post is sourced), and a glimpse of material and social history that can be hard to find in other studies. Also worth a click for the photos; the flowered embroidery design reminds me of my younger niece's art, it is wonderful - so much so, I hope I may be forgiven for reproducing it (caption intact)

A page of embroidery design’s from Ann Flower’s sketchbook.
Ann Flower, Sketchbook, ca.1753-1760?, Doc. 1244,
Downs Collections, Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden.

The Atlantic gets into a topic that's rattled around the back of my own mind of late, human sacrifice. While I was considering the spiritual prejudices of taboo (and more specifically child sacrifice) , the focus here is hierarchical - the social structure and implications of ritualized human sacrifice. An attempt to analyze is providing some interesting concepts about the development of the practice, and the point at which it collapses as well.

With staggering frequency ... it was religion rather than reason that turned people away from ritualized brutality.

Corporation, person, citizen. History is fascinating stuff, kids. Legal history can be maddening, when you realize you are governed by century-and-a-half old lies. (The click beyond? Oddly enough, I ran across Roscoe Conkling twice in today's reading. Have a look at him here, this time in a story about the assassination of President Garfield.)

Ahh, Smithsonian Magazine - you always make for good while-away-a-lunch-hour reading. Today, I enjoyed a piece about Holi, one of those festivals of joy and empowerment I'd love to experience. This leapt out: "blue is a reminder that evil exists but can be contained, through courage and right actions." As a recently-blue-haired old lady, that appeals to me. (Extra credit question: does Crayola still make the Indian Yellow crayon ... ?)

Sketchy

She's the weirdest tattooed-and-blued woman. The blue hair is there, check. Maybe I only imagine that the tattoos are showing, subtly, through a thin gauze blouse with a wide neckline. But there is something so weird about the way she is weird; she does it wrong, and she does it wrong on purpose.

Most people color their hair unexpectedly, or get tattoos, or get piercings or ever-increasing-gauge plugs, to rebel, to have cred for a subculture or attitude. To be indelibly and obviously - overtly - aggressively - Different. "I am apart, and this is how I am apart." She's done it because she is drawn to the colors she paints herself. And she's brought nonconformity in line with a taste level that's just off to one side of her corporate day job AND her penchant for the unusual.

She can conform neither to normality nor revolution.

It's hard, still, not to stare at her. In an airport full of corporate road warriors, kids, geriatrics, families, and military from all over the world, she's the oddest thing going. Not least because she is utterly still.

She's staring at me, of course. Transfixed in that way I knew once, almost a decade and a half ago - so much younger I think of that face as a girl's now, though she was mid-thirties even then. Her face is a rictus, contorted, both in relief and in pain.


There is a chain of beads around her neck, gleaming facets silver as mirrors breaking the smooth, wide swath of her skin between her strange, short hair and the gauzy blouse. Her throat, the sinuous line of her profile as she turns away a moment - the negative space around every part of her makes her seem small, even as her eyes seem bigger than I remember.

Nothing is, and everything is, as I remembered. All that luxuriant hair is gone, and the swirling strands that are left aren't even the right color. Her clothes seem hippie-ish; even knowing there was a bit of the flower child in her, she's never been that image in my head, that wasn't the her that I spent our time with. She seems taller, and darker, and softer, and stranger.

Everything strange, until I am next to her. And a fragment of scent steals toward me, and I know this is her. Something she wrote once... "Roses and pepper and honey and fear."

The airport asserts itself when she speaks, even as tiny as the verbiage is. "Hi."

I lean down to her, and ... Oh. To be against her. When my eyes are not on her, that's when she is most familiar, suddenly. *That* breathing. *That* curve of her back. My hands find their places on her hips without either of us negotiating. There is no kiss, and, for the moment, no more words. Something more elemental than greeting. There is some frisson, there is a release, there is some unbidden, sub-verbal thing. Reunion. I feel myself squeezing, and utterly still.


We stand there a minute, breathing. Randomly, I find myself laughing, because I can feel her smelling me, and I remember all the times she said, last time, "You smell like *you*." She also kept saying, "You are stupidly hot" just to be a dork.

That hair is silken at my jaw. She is sweet and spiced. Warm. Living space heater, she always was that, and all the grey and watery time we'ves spent, stolen visits since I went away, were warmed by her.

We don't look at each other. It's baggage claim.

Random Title

Mis-reading a sentence at lunch today, I came across a phrase that made my brain think, "The Chance of War" and I thought, ooh, neat, using chance in both its senses would make a cool title for an interesting story.

But I'm not going to, which is a shame, because I have such trouble coming up with titles for the things I *do* write.

So it's free for anyone who likes it. Have fun!

"You can do ANYTHING you set your mind to."

25 years ago now, having left my marriage and come home to Virginia, I found myself in a job with one of the best managers I've ever known, a woman I'll call C. C managed a keen balance between getting the ratty jobs done but finding each employee's talents, and playing to them. So it was that, as a secretary, I ended up assisting the guy who was writing a book. And the IT guy. Writing our newsletter. And, by the end, taking care of orphan clients (we were an insurance and financial services agency).

It was just at the moment I was about to be sent to Minnesota in February for securities training that I left that gig. But I never did forget that manager, and C stands out to this day as one of the smartest people I've ever worked with. And I've worked with some great, wise people.

All this time later, I have found a position where I get to do my own balancing - still a secretary, but one with decades more experience on the resume, and in a company/with a team where I have been able, almost singlehanded, to define my job. I get to play to my own strengths now.

Not long ago, I was thinking again about how I ended up being a secretary. Yeah, it was the early and mid-80s that formed me, and yeah I was VERY much an underachiever during my early career (though, looking at that job I mentioned above - maybe not so lacking in gumption as I have told myself for so long now) ... but nothing was stopping me from pursuing some more specific or lucrative or creative ambition.

But, the thing is: my parents always told me, "You can do anything you set your mind to."

Here is the problem: they never gave me specifics. Mom might occasionally talk about things *she* would wish to do, or which she found prestigious.

But neither my mom nor my dad ever did as C did: took up the thread of what I loved, or was good at (which were not entirely the same thing), and revealed to me the particular things my talents or my abilities could lead to. Nope, not even my dad. And he was a professor - a student advisor. His very life and career were dedicated to pushing people toward success.

Or ... maybe just to knowledge. To understanding those concepts he himself taught, or to harnessing those from other disciplines, which his students were studying. Synthesizing these to the tools to reach their specific goals.

My dad was encouraging to a fault - but the fault was, he just opened the doors wide. He provided no guide but "anything" - and that was too much. Overwhelming, or under.

I have always known that what I do is "less" in the eyes of other people; nobody's subtle about it. I basically fell into it to make a living. Doing what I do was not a dream, wasn't something I *sought*. I have made it mine, and I'm not complaining nor regretting. But it, in the barest and least freighted, but clearest sense of the phrase, "is what it is."



I could do anything I set my mind to. Sure. But in high school, I already knew I was directionless.

And MOST OF US ARE as teenagers. And that is okay.

But then majoring in Theater (or, insufferably, Theatre/Dance, at my insufferable alma mater) never was going to get me famous and wealthy and yield a successful movie star at the end of college.

(To which I now say: Thank MAUD.)

But it wasn't getting me anywhere else, either. Working on the crew was pizza money and fun, not a career trajectory. Our department wasn't good enough to provide one of those, frankly.

And I could type.

So I fell into my first jobs, my early talents - whatever they might have been - sublimated to make a living, and over the years I've done well, or just done *enough*, and scrabbled and fought my way to giving a damn ... and here we are.



I am proud of my work, and I love what I do. But don't ever think that this was my fantasy. Or even my calling. It was barely my *aptitude*, even, for a while there.





This morning, musing to a friend at work that my hair was looking particularly teased-and-tapered in an 80s sort of way, I pulled up Beauty and the Beat on my phone, and revisited that time before directionlessness became ... well, to borrow one of the Go-Go's song titles, Automatic.

The Go-Go's, I think, may seem a bit bugglegum and maybe even gimmicky these days. But that first album, steeped in 1981 and its New Wave-ness, was not a feather-light pop concoction. There is a menace in the chords. This album is bouncy, but it's bouncing on bruises, and it's propulsive. (Automatic is very dark and affecting. It *still* hits me in a very deep place, perhaps the more for life's experience rather than less.)

And this album is inextricably linked to the one person, before C, who ever pointed me at anything specific.

It was my brother.

I can't remember how it came up, and how it ever seemed "real" at all - and, the fact is, the moment of this memory may not have lasted more than a few days. But my brother, for some reason, excitedly encouraged me to get a band together, like the Go-Go's. To cover them, for Stunt Talent Night. He pointed to Kathy Valentine, and said I could do what she did.

It didn't change my life - or, at least, it didn't set me on a path. But my brother was the only family member who ever looked at anything in me, and pointed to anything at all. He didn't say "You can do anything you set your mind to."

He said, "You could do THAT."


I was too shy. I didn't know any musicians. Time ticked on, the moment passed, I never did it. Years later, I still entertained the odd fantasy of being a drummer - or, later still, a lead singer. But instead I watched Beloved Ex do it, and was still too shy. And never thought to connect to the many musicians we did know then, to try to become one of them. Well, never thought of it seriously. Never had the confidence to try.

And I had a job. And hadn't, perhaps, divested myself of the vague idea I might become wealthy and famous by sitting around waiting, hopefully being 80s-foxy enough for the world just to arrange its attention and money around me. Or maybe being a writer. Or just getting by, day to day.

There were a lot of years of getting by, long periods of time lived day to day.

And, not in the least ironically at all, it was my brother, again, who pointed me at something, years later. Aged 35, he asked me to go to a writers' conference ... and we all know how that has gone. Still the world has not arranged itself around my ridiculous success. But at least I consider myself something more than a 'nartist now.


I don't wish things had gone some other way. My life is an awfully good one to live, and the means to my living never has been the most important thing to me (the people I work with are, though). The idea of an alternative life in which What I Do *was* more important is no source of regret for me; perhaps in that life, my soul would not have been the one I have here and now, and my soul means everything to me.

No, I don't wish things had gone differently at all.

Just: looking at my parents. Thinking of the way C managed the people she worked with. I'm actually just surprised it *didn't* go differently. And curiously grateful I failed to have certain dreams ... ? What I did have was people like C, and others, and enough privilege to say I've made my way successfully, even if not prestigiously.


And I'm doubly grateful for that big brother, too. Turns out - he's actually even more special than I understood. Back in those years when I idolized him so, and didn't even know why.

She is BEAT

This was something I wrote a good while ago, but is resonating with something I've seen a few times recently ...

The human desire for self-decoration isn't always a product of the Horrible Beauty Industry duping us poor, stupid women into thinking we're not pretty enough. It goes back as far as humanity itself, and I happen to be one of those humans (it ain't just women) who like "dressing up" and I also like to vary what that means in unexpected ways. This is FUN for me.

The underlying presumption of the whole "you don't need makeup" makes my choices about the viewer - generally about a male viewer, who thinks he can do me a favor by relieving me of my efforts to please. Playing with makeup and costume pleases ME.

The something I have seen recently is a makeup ad, one I am not going to link because I'm not a shill, featuring a beautiful young woman made up in different ways, for several occasions. There is a narrative track, presumed to be her voice, talking about how she makes her makeup support her identities. It's a wonderful departure from closeups of pneumatic lips, giggling models, the oft-evoked aspirationalism of cosmetic marketing - not by forgoing aspirations, but by framing them in an individual's identity. She has curled hair, straight hair, dramatic eyes, or a lighter touch with her brushes - and her final message is, cosmetics are my TOOLS.

She is not subject to them, they are subject to her. She uses makeup to paint the picture she sees, of herself, to evoke moods, to draw her idea of beauty.

This is a model, of course. She's not in need of remediation. But the message of an ad always hopes viewers will identify with the star of the ad - and, in this one, we're asked to identify with a person, and to see that her tools are good ones. The line to "aspire to be This Beautiful" - to fixed body image or features or hair, to ideals themselves - is no longer direct. It's there; you can't market cosmetics without the promise of Beauty. But the arrow at the end of the line now points to a more flexible form of beauty, AND to the fact that we're in charge of anything a mascara or a lip gloss or a ceramic flat-iron may have to offer. We're the ones who DO the beauty, in the end.

This ad struck me the first time I saw it, and it's struck me the same way again. So, clearly, it works. Someone in some ad agency or marketing realized that we can make *money* exploiting themes that seem less exploitive.

And, you know what? I am good with that. I don't recall what company the ads are for, and it most likely won't bring me to their products in itself, but I *do* applaud, even if quietly, in this simple little backwater on Teh Intarwebs, the acknowledgement that, y'know, not all beauty products speak to the inherent ugliness of our creatureliness of humanity, which we must cover up or correct for.

Bitten

It's a day like many others, but not "any other." Productive, with excuses. I am ploughing through the work on my desk, but skipping this afternoon's "run" in our fitness room. Slitting envelopes, copying legal down to letter for scanning, uploads. Multi-tasking, but all one task - just different steps in the order, converging, week on week invading each other's time. Click-click.

Boom.

It swims up from nowhere, unbidden. Not necessarily unwanted. But unwonted. Unexpected. Half gorgeous, and half cruel.

Memory of two words, out of your mouth.

I miss you so much it makes me gasp. Missing you an old habit. Missing you a way of life. It doesn't define me, it doesn't maim me.

oh, but. oh but

smaller and smaller, too smallevenfortheshiftkey. Shrinking.

Constricted.



Two words, and I am all but weeping. Slitting envelopes. Copying paper. Near the end of the day, but not near enough. Constricted.







I miss you.

That's three. Your two were more profound.

Collection

Dunking doughnuts outside the 54th floor, Louis and Mrs. Armstrong at the Sphinx, a woman neck-deep in grapes, Malyshka the Russian Space Dog of Sputnik II ... oh and so indescribably MUCH more. Photos from The Atlantic's amazing archive.

In fuzzy-history-we-think-we-know: did you realize that the Equal Rights Amendment passed forty-six years ago, almost to the month? But it has never been ratified. Yes, ladies - and women too - there is still a deficit of two states' ayes to enforce what even CONGRESS was able to say yes to, way on back in 1972. More than a quarter of states in the theoretically United States still don't care to accept the amendment, two generations on. I am not proud to note my home state remains a holdout.

Tom Williams has a good post, reviewing New Grub Street by George Gissing. As interesting as the work looks, one of Tom's points is meta - that the work contains the flaws it rails against. He also points out that the complaints of the fictional author in New Grub Street are still with us today. To take this one more layer of meta, this morning before I saw his post, I happened to get up and turn on The Loves of Edgar Allen Poe as my background to waking up and getting ready. I was fascinated by its repeated commentary on a writer's raw deal in publishing, out of the Poe character's mouth, and got curious about the world of publishing circa, say 1941 or 1942 (the movie came out in 1942). Little is to be found about Brian Foy, who wrote the screenplay, in a cursory search, but he seems to have started life as a child entertainer before becoming a writer - easy to imagine he was exploited in more than one way in his given professions. I leave the link to Tom's post with only the observation that there is either hope or despair in knowing that it's never been easy in publishing.

Tom has another post of interest - short, beautiful, and poignant - about the Palace of Peace, the elite, and rumors of war. Sigh.

Hiya

For the dwindling few who read this blog - and I'm not actually sure about any readers at all, save one (hi, Cute Shoes!) - it is perhaps apparent I haven't had much to say here, or even just link here, in the past couple of months. There actually are some Draft posts I thought were in the works, but which are ageing and getting no attention. And there is one post on my mind, but which I have not sat down to write. The key words to remind me what I want to say haven't faded from mind (a good sign), but that's not progress.

Yep, family has had my attention. When someone spends close to eight years dying on you, it can come to absorb the focus off and on. Crises even arise; and yet, bizarrely, nothing seems to happen. If this seems a contradictory statement, please understand that you are blessed; for those who understand, my prayers will be with you.

Work, too, got hairy there for some months. At this point, that's neither excuse for not writing (which is fine, as I have been - at least, some) nor not cropping up here, so I'm not sure it signifies. It's just one of the usual excuses we see from writers online.

The house is fine, as far as that goes. And Penelope and Gossamer are SPLENDID, which goes very far indeed.

Weather has been a bummer. Far from six more weeks of winter, it seems to me what Punxsutawney Phil gifted us this year was just six more weeks of RAIN, or at the very least, grim weather indeed. This is not to say it's been cold. Far from it, we've had alternating temps from the 70s to the 40s for weeks, which is almost worse than extended cold, because (a) people have sinuses, thank you, and (b) it's not a pleasanter day when the rain goes from "dank" to "muggy" in twelve hours, sinks back, and then swells again, over and over. One hardly knows what to wear out the door. But, more than anything, the unrelenting DRAB of it all is wearing.

I candidly admit, recent years of drought - given the privilege of an unstinting clean water supply - seemed to me, if nothing else, *prettier* than this by comparison. Okay, maybe unrelentingly heated, particularly a few years back when 100+ got to be too frequent in summertime. Sure, I wished we had rain then. But this isn't normal either, it's not the natural seasonal barter present in the Piedmont/just-shy-of-Tidewater region.

There comes a time in every season, when they behave normally (my memory is long), when you look at your rows or hangers or what-have-you of sweaters and stylish, warm coats and things, and think, "Ahh, yes, it will be good when springtime comes" and you remember the way it feels not to have to lug out a load of outerwear just to walk outside. Or when you are hot and sweaty, look at the endless sleeveless tops and things, and think how cozy a turtleneck will be, some starry evening soon while you contemplate holidays.

What we have right now, though, is more despairing and less sparing. It's been a pitiless year for many - the storms a SUMMER ago in Puerto Rico still have not been dealt with, and here we are on the brink of another storm season. Knowing how much worse than merely "grim" the weather has been for so many, it's out of proportion for me to complain.

Still, the depression of weather becomes the low-pressure system in life itself. A winter's slog, family time stolen by illness, smaller celebrations dragged wanly through rainstorms, the hundred things not even bothered with under leaden skies. The constraint upon enthusiasm or enterprise.

Blogs fall by the wayside.

But I haven't forgotten this place is here, even if there IS nobody really reading these days. One assumes people have better things to do, too - goodness, I certainly hope so. I'm only even here myself, prattling a bit while some electronic business tediously feeds itself slowly to fruition while I wait for it.

Stay tuned for me to actually *have* anything to say. It'll be more poetic, and even contain actual substance.

Hoping all my readers, (Reider and otherwise) are well and coming through winter with loved ones, inspiration, and outlooks all intact.

I always listen to Eubie Blake on his birthday

Almost my birthday, and all I want is death

This post is a barely-edited version of an email I sent this morning. It's funny how trains of thought actually seem to create their own tracks and destinations.



Forwarded message to a best friend TEO...


"When bitching about a sweater gets REALLY dup and profiend.

Sometimes, being a writer is weird."


-----Original Message-----
Original email to Mr. X
Sent: Tue, Feb 6, 2018 8:06 am
Subject: Yep nope

The quest for the right wardrobe never seems to end. I bought a sweater maybe three months ago - it was definitely "recent" - but am deciding today, it has got to go. Which is especially irritating, as it's a GAP and I usually have good luck with GAP. (One red/black damask print v-neck has lasted me like six years now, it's woooooonnnderful.) But this simple blue rib knit: I'm not into that whole Marie Kondo thing, but this sweater is NOT GIVING ME JOY.

Which, ugh. This sweater made me use THAT phrase. This sweater sucks.

The thing is - it's really comfortable, it's the length I like, and the color is great on me. It is also pill--tastick (yes, with a K - like your name, it needs the consonantal emphasis), the "inseam" tag sticks out (and no, I don't cut out care tags because lord knows I'll louse up the laundry at some point), and the front hangs really weird at the bottom. Gah.

So, though I've worn this probably not even half a dozen times: I need to get rid of this thing.

Life is too short to wear unflattering (and prematurely RATTY) sweaters.

It's just a shame I happen to be wearing the thing NOW. On my fake-Friday, and family day. And with good jewelry, too! Blah.


Tonight is steak night at mom and Stepdad's. The filets from Christmas, which we didn't eat because everyone came down with the flu.

This'll be the way to spend some family celebration time with Step, but leave Wednesday free for me and mom. He's been in bed a couple days, and says he might not eat with us (he'll almost certainly eat with us, but how he'll be feeling today overall is up in the air). Sigh. Poor S. He just can't seem to die.

Bro and I were talking about him this weekend. He said it was something of a shame we came to love him after he lost his mind - I think there's a feeling akin to guilt, for Bro - but I feel like it's a blessing. We LOVE him. Neither of us felt like that was a possibility twelve years ago, and okay, it took dementia to loosen S up and give him this sense of humor we treasure. But he's loosened up. He is funny. We love him. That is enough of a blessing, and dementia is enough a part of life, I feel like it's worth just being grateful for the love and the blessing.

This is the power of a sense of humor, really. Laughter is so elementally *human*, I think, that the bonds it creates can't be trivialized. I mean: look at the way I talk about your face, broken up with laughter. It's in no way a small thing, the way that is beautiful to me.

It's in no way a small gift: S's immense grace in his sense of humor.

They always say there's no comedy without pain. I'd have to agree; that's fair. S's wit has come at such a price. Life itself, arguably. But his funny-ness has made all our lives just that much more wonderful. And just saying that squeezes my heart, and all but breaks it.

And as much as I am grateful for the incandescence of S's impishness and his smile, G-d I wish it could be taken from us all. I wish he could die. Because as long as we have his brilliance with us, HE has to endure such hideous, unbreakable pain. It is so unjust - and I know life is not fair. But nobody should ever suffer this. I would not even wish this on a Trump.

And even with all that, to feel *guilty* about loving his humor would be to waste it, and to negate the blessing it is. I just have to pray it is some amount of blessing for S. It looks like it is. It looks like, even if only a moment at a time, it takes him out of the pain. Even as selfish as it is: he takes *us* out of it. He invites us out of the reality he can't escape himself.

I've never seen grace quite like that. S is something so special.